Tag: Howard Kazanjian

Why DEI Was Always a Dumb Idea: What we learned from the Swordsman Scene in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’

I really loved the book about Howard Kazanjian called A Producer’s Life.  I’ve referenced it many times over the last several weeks because it was an enjoyable book.  It’s the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a while, and it is one that I promised myself I’d read if Trump was re-elected into the White House.  I wouldn’t let myself think about these kinds of things as what is in Howard’s book prior, even if I do love the topic.  For a large part of my life, I wanted to be a filmmaker, and Hollywood producers like Howard Kazanjian were the kind of people who inspired me.  He produced most of my favorite movies from a key period, when he was on top of the Hollywood pile with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and many others, with films from 1975 until 1982.   Howard was always good, but if you are trending good movies and who made them over the entire history of Hollywood, this specific period set the stage for what the industry would become, and mean to the world as a whole regarding entertainment.  So, I find it very interesting to study what went right and wrong during this period.  Ironically, learning these things is precisely why understanding DEI policies and why they failed is important.  Because currently, after the Trump election and his spectacular victory, the world is giving up on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, and rightfully so.  We’re not talking about a Republican versus Democrat position here; Howard Kazanjian, I would say, probably leans toward Hollywood liberalism and likely wanted Kamala Harris to win the election.  But with Trump back in office, the world is a lot better, and I have more tolerance for people who are not so bright on political matters.  Which is why I couldn’t let myself read a book like this before the election. 

In that book, I read a good illustrative example of why DEI failed and why companies needed to get rid of it for the sake of everyone.  Picking employees based on their skin color or assuming they are equal to other people and that they should be included in something just because they exist was always ridiculous.  Some people are better than others, and if you want something to be good, you have to find the best people and put them in place; that’s good management.  And in the movie business, good people are few and far between.  But Howard Kazanjian, during that period I mentioned, found a way to be around the best people in the business, and specifically, a conversation I had never heard about regarding the famous swordsman scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, being filmed in 1980 for a 1981 release.  Everyone, no matter who they are, knows the scene.  Indiana Jones is looking for his lost girlfriend, Marian, who the Nazis have captured on the streets of Cairo.  And he has to stop them with a glorious shootout with lots of explosions and good stuff.  Along the way, Indiana Jones is stopped by an Arab swordsman who wants to fight.  But the hero doesn’t have time for it.  What does he do?   People remember with great recollection that Indy pulls out his gun, shoots the villain on the spot with no fanfare, and gets back to looking for his girlfriend.  In all the documentaries of how that movie was made, we learned that Harrison Ford was sick that day and just did the scene as a joke because there was supposed to be a fight with bullwhips that was very elaborate, and the whole crew was sick of filming take after take.  When Spielberg saw what Harrison Ford did, he wanted to keep it as a new version and print it for the film.  But there was more to the story I heard in this book on Howard Kazanjian for the first time.

George Lucas still wanted his bullwhip fight scene.  One of the reasons he was making Raiders of the Lost Ark as the executive producer was to create a modern version of the kind of movies he liked as a kid, and he wanted a classic bullwhip fight like might have been in Don Q Son of Zorro, or Zorro’s Fighting Legion.  And he wasn’t convinced that just having Indiana Jones shoot the bad guy and get on with his business was the right thing to do.  So, here were the most talented filmmakers in movie-making history who disagreed with this famous scene.  So what were they going to do?  George Lucas decided to run two film versions by a test audience, one Spielberg’s way, the other with the bullwhip fight.  They were going to let market desire determine the film’s final version.  So they played George’s version first to a test audience.  People came out of the movie liking it, and Paramount Pictures felt they had a hit.  It was a good movie.  But when Spielberg’s version was seen, people applauded when Indiana Jones shot the swordsman.  And it became everyone’s favorite moment in the movie, even after all these years.  They made 5 Indiana Jones films over the next 40 years, but none would ever have a better moment than that one to mass audiences. 

Ultimately, even with all the talent of all these people involved, it was the marketplace that picked the scene. The filmmakers came up with ideas, but to determine the success of the enterprise, they tested the waters with market analysis. The audience clearly picked one version over the other, and the rest is filmmaking history.  Presently, they are test-screening the new Captain America movie for Disney, and it is going through all kinds of trouble because nothing is working.  The film is filled with a bunch of woke politics, and people don’t like it.  It’s going to bomb when it hits theaters in February.  Ultimately, that is why DEI programs destroyed market share and value for all companies, from cookie makers to high-tech offerings.  DEI was an imposed value put on the marketplace that would have been similar to George Lucas keeping his whip fight in the movie because he wanted it, to force the audience to like it because he did.  Instead of listening to them, which is what happened.  When companies try to impose themselves on the public and force values on them that they don’t have, failure is almost assured.  However, when products appeal to the audience’s sentiment, great success is possible.  It is rare because good ideas are complex, and companies often hang on to them even if the market pressure rejects them.  Only to plot an enterprise to its doom.  But when we say that getting rid of DEI suits all businesses everywhere, this is what we mean and why.  In capitalism, value serves the marketplace.  In authoritarian governments, values are imposed, and a monopoly status is sought that limits the viability of options.  And the world is far worse off because of it.  The best example of why some ideas work over other ideas can sometimes come from interesting places, which is undoubtedly the case with a movie most people agree has some value to them over time, and that is how Indiana Jones was created in that old classic movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Individuals Beat Corporations Every Time: Why success happens

This could apply to anything, but studying why some movies released at the theater are better than others is critical because of how the movie business works.  People get together and tell a story, and the value of that story is released to the public for them to vote on.  People tend to think of Hollywood as very glamorous, but in truth, very few people who work in the industry ever get to be a part of an extraordinary success, a ratio even less than in other fields of endeavor.  So it is always interesting to understand why some people put together a string of hits, such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, along with producer Howard Kazanjian.  An even more important example is the role that George Lucas’ first wife, Marcia Lucas, played in some of the most memorable and good movies of all time.  Also, why did a small, family-owned company like Lucasfilm lose its magic once it became a corporate conglomerate under Disney?  All this was in a fabulous book called ‘A Producer’s Life,’ which was about the life and times of Howard Kasanjian, who produced several of the Star Wars movies and the start of the Indiana Jones franchise, among other classic films like Cool Hand Luke, The Wild Bunch, and working with Alfred Hitchcock.  This book caused much stir when it first came out because Marcia Lucas was just as upset about Disney killing off Han Solo as I was for many political reasons.  That was just another example of how corporations that use processes to isolate individual contributions produce products in the world that are not as desired by the market.  In the case of the new Star Wars movies, the belief was that the film itself held all the magic and that a girl could replace a character like Han Solo to accommodate all kinds of woke rules wrapped around the axil of globalism. However, the Disney people never understood Star Wars, and this book had the opinions of someone who was very close to Star Wars, who was the key to their success initially. 

The book came out in 2021, right in the middle of the Covid monstrosity, and Biden had just been inserted into the White House, so I wasn’t in the mood to think about movies.  But I promised myself that if Trump returned to the White House, I’d get the book, take a bit of a vacation, and allow myself to think about some fun things.  For me, these are some of the most fun things, and they show how entertainment impacts culture as a whole.  And when it comes to those movies, Indiana Jones and Star Wars, few people have put together the kind of hits as filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.  The corporate belief is that just anybody can make a good movie or a good anything if only enough money is spent on the project, and in film, typically, the industry attracts all the same kind of sharks looking for an easy dollar as Wall Street does.  But few of them, if anybody, understands what makes hits and misses in the marketplace.  I have always wondered why George Lucas was so good from 1975 to 1982.  After that period, George Lucas wasn’t very good at all.  He may have been interesting, but he had lost his touch, and I always thought it probably had something to do with his wife, Marcia. 

There were two good Star Wars movies, and then everything fell off the rails with Return of the Jedi.  The movies were self-funded and only distributed through 20th Century Fox.  George Lucas hated corporate filmmaking; he wanted to make independent films from a family-driven company.  This allowed someone like the film editor, his wife, Marcia Lucas, to put her personal touches all over those early movies, which were key to their successes.  Something Disney and all its resources today don’t have is that personal touch.  During Return of the Jedi, Marcia and George divorced, and she ran off with the stained glass window guy working on their Skywalker Ranch.  That sounds kind of cheap and stupid, but George Lucas was working hard at the time to maintain his independence from the studio system, so he was putting all the pressure on himself.  This is another reason why those family-made movies were so good.  It wasn’t the board of directors or BlackRock assets making the decisions; it was George Lucas.  But it drove a wedge between him and his wife, and he never recovered.  Neither did she.  They should have stuck it out, but that’s history now, and the results tell quite a story.  Because she worked with her husband, Marcia knew how to get the best out of the coverage shots he provided as a director and could make a story pop on the screen that resonated with audiences.  You have to be an excellent person to produce good work, which gets lost in all corporations: those individual contributions.  For instance, if SpaceX lost Elon Musk, the company would fail quickly.  We always see it in sports: a star player carries a franchise.  As the saying goes, there is no “I” in team, but there is in win.  Teams are not values, they are places where people can hide so they don’t have to deal with the pressure of taking on too much responsibility.

One time, when the character of Indiana Jones was being created, Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas designed the character before principal photography, and they were all talking about giving Indiana Jones some flaws that the audience could relate to, such as making him smoke and drink too much.  But as she often did with many of those early Lucasfilm movies, Marcia stepped in and gave her opinion that was critical to the effort’s success.  Keep in mind that these three moviemakers were some of the best of the best in the business. But it took George Lucas’ wife to point out the obvious.  She told them this was a kid’s movie and they couldn’t have Indiana Jones drinking and smoking.  He’ll lose all his charm, which they didn’t understand then.  But George listened to his wife, as usual, and the character became one of the most beloved in all movie history.  They are still trying to make money off Indiana Jones, with Disney running the studio.  But they don’t understand the character because they don’t have someone like Marcia Lucas in the editing room polishing everything up.  They have access to tens of thousands of talented filmmaking types, but very few understand the subtlety of success and failure.  Without question, Marcia Lucas, as a high-quality individual, made those early movies better.  She also made Lucas, Spielberg, and Harrison Ford better.  Better than any of them would ever be again once she was no longer a part of their lives.  After the divorce, it went all downhill from there.  They still made good movies, but they had all lost their touch, never to duplicate it again.  And no matter what business we’re talking about, that same kind of ratio applies.  Corporations often don’t get it; they mimic what made them great and hope nobody notices.  But to become great in the first place, there is always some charismatic individual, or a collection of them, who come together and make magic happen.  And without those individuals, no process in the world can promise success, purposefully or by accident.  Family-owned businesses are some of the best ways to achieve that success, and Lucasfilm was a family-owned business in those early days.  Once they became a corporate conglomerate, they could no longer make magic, and the brands they were associated with died in the court of public opinion. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

What To Learn From Howard Kazanjian’s ‘A Producers Life’: Hollywood was never going to be able to help a bad product like Kamala Harris

This will be fun; I could do it every day for years.  I’m not sure how useful that would be, but I’d enjoy it.  And that is explaining to Democrats why they lost the 2024 election.  The first answer is that election fraud was harder for them.  They still cheat in many places, have been caught, and will get into trouble over it.  In these areas of the country that have still been counting ballots weeks after the election in November of 2024, there is only one reason: introducing false ballots to change the outcome.  And in those places, voter ID is a problem, and so are the mathematical trends.  You don’t win in all these national elections, and, in strange places, trend the other way.  That might happen in random spots, but not like this.  Many of these House and Senate seats were stolen for Democrats to keep those two government bodies from sliding even further to Republicans.  It will be easy to prove, and the Trump Justice Department will be able to prosecute those cases efficiently.   But the point remains: if Democrats can’t cheat, they can’t win.  That also makes this perspective that has been going on with Democrats about Hollywood even funnier.  They believed that Hollywood support from celebrities and the visual effects ads they had access to with people like Steven Spielberg would turn people toward their side.  Yeah, that was never going to happen, and I’ve known that for a long time from very personal experience with Hollywood.  They don’t have that kind of power, and they never did.  They only illusioned themselves by talking about these things within their inward culture. 

I just finished reading a great book I promised myself I’d read if Trump won the election.  And boy, is it a real treasure; it’s the autobiography of the film producer Howard Kazanjian, ‘A Producer’s Life,’ and it was a wonderful experience.  I rarely get to read something that good, and it’s not a book intended for mass audiences.  Maybe only 100,000 people worldwide would be interested in it, and most of them would likely be film students.  The book came out in 2021, but I was too busy these last couple of years, even with all my reading, to sit down and enjoy a book like that.  Howard is one of my favorite film producers of all time, and he’s been close to some of my favorite movies, from the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films to Cool Hand Luke and The Wild Bunch.  He worked with Hitchcock and many big-name Hollywood directors through the latest golden age of cinema, from the late 70s to the early 80s.  He told many stories about things that have gone on behind the scenes in many movies that I found fascinating, and I wouldn’t let myself think like that because of all the other stuff politically going on.  There wasn’t time to enjoy anything like that, so the first thing I did once Trump was elected was give myself a bit of a vacation and read a few books like this that I had been thinking about for a long time.  In it, Howard essentially confirms everything I have been saying about Hollywood.  Much of the appeal of that industry is fake, in front of the camera and especially behind it. Hollywood is about creating illusions, not truth, and in this climate of free media and free speech, anything phony is going to be rooted out and rejected.  Someone should have told the Democrats that, but they were so obsessed with their ability to make images that suckers buy in a darkened theater that they missed the trend.  And they have lost miserably because of it.  And they aren’t making any corrections to change anything, which is fine with me.

All this has provoked in me remembrances of my exposure to Hollywood culture, and I quickly learned how phony it was.  I was always just as interested in what happened behind the camera as I was in front of it, and quickly, you see what kind of mentality goes on in these Hollywood productions.  Most people in the industry do not think like Howard; he’s one of the great ones, but most think people are so stupid that they can manipulate the thoughts of mass society with the Hollywood image.  They miss the whole point, and the entire industry misses the truth.  Because they purposely live in a kind of entertainment bubble, they don’t get to talk to real people much, except when they do press junkets and comic cons and lose touch with reality.  I tasted that when I worked on projects, and a producer gave me my trailer to reside between takes. The line producers pamper you with union-standard assumptions.  I thought it was all interesting and for me, a dream come true career wise, but not very practical or sustainable.  I have the opposite way of viewing things as they do; I expect the people being photographed to be good people, turn on the camera, and capture a little bit of their natural essence, and that what is sold is worth investing your time and energy into. 

Ultimately, that’s why the Hollywood machine could never overtake Trump: He isn’t just an image; he’s a lot more in real life than what a camera can capture.  And Kamala Harris’ people thought that if they raised over a billion dollars, they could purchase an image and that voters would be dumb enough to buy it like they would the next Hollywood blockbuster.  That if the movie preview was good but the movie sucked, that people would still buy it.  And, of course, they didn’t.  Reading that book about Howard Kazanjian reminded me of how out of touch many in the movie industry are, even when they are the best in their field.  Ultimately, Hollywood is too slow and clunky to be relevant in the modern world, which is one reason their industry is dying.  The unions will not allow them to keep pace with YouTube content creators, and that’s where entertainment is headed.  People aren’t going to wait for three years for movie content anymore, teased well in advance.  And they aren’t going to buy the Hollywood product of making an image of a president of the United States without the substance of doing anything meaningful as a leader.  It all comes down to public opinion, and just because Hollywood can make an image, they can’t make people buy into it.  That is precisely the trouble the woke new Captain America movie is struggling with regarding test audiences.  The producers won’t be able to cut together enough coverage to fix the film because its merit is terrible, just like Kamala Harris.  More fancy camerawork won’t change the fact that people don’t like the characters in bad situations.  What would you expect if it’s a woke storyline coming from Disney these days? People aren’t going to buy it.  And they rejected Kamala for the same reasons.  Hollywood couldn’t make her.  Hollywood was, and will always be, a reflection of what people want to buy.  Not the creators of what people do buy.  That is a lesson Hollywood has never learned, which is why they are now perplexed.  And also why I do not work in that industry.  I can’t do the phony thing, for me, it has to be real.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707